Excellent list. Please read the whole thing!

5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home

Rolf Potts is one of my favorite writers, and his book Vagabonding was one of only four books I recommended as “fundamental” in The 4-Hour Workweek. It was also one of two books, the other being Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, that I took with me during my 15+-month mini-retirement that began in 2004.

The following is a guest post from Rolf on the art and lessons of travel, all of which you can apply at home.

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1) Time = Wealth

By far the most important lesson travel teaches you is that your time is all you really own in life. And the more you travel, the more you realize that your most extravagant possessions can’t match the satisfaction you get from finding new experiences, meeting new people, and learning new things about yourself. “Value” is a word we often hear in day-to-day life, but travel has a way of teaching us that value is not pegged to a cash amount, that the best experiences in life can be had for the price of showing up (be it to a festival in Rajasthan, a village in the Italian countryside, or a sunrise ten minutes from your home).

Scientific studies have shown that new experiences (and the memories they produce) are more likely to produce long-term happiness than new things. Since new experiences aren’t exclusive to travel, consider ways to become time-rich at home. Spend less time working on things you don’t enjoy and buying things you don’t need; spend more time embracing the kinds of activities (learning new skills, meeting new people, spending time with friends and family) that make you feel alive and part of the world.

2) Be Where You Are

A great thing about travel is that it forces you into the moment. When you’re celebrating carnival in Rio, riding a horse on the Mongolian steppe, or exploring a souk in Damascus, there’s a giddy thrill in being exactly where you are and allowing things to happen. In an age when electronic communications enable us to be permanently connected to (and distracted by) the virtual world, there’s a narcotic thrill in throwing yourself into a single place, a single moment. Would you want to check your bank-account statement while exploring Machu Picchu in Peru? Are you going to interrupt an experience of the Russian White Nights in St. Petersburg to check your Facebook feed? Of course not — when you travel, you get to embrace the privilege of witnessing life as it happens before your eyes. This attitude need not be confined to travel.

At home, how often do you really need to check your email or your Twitter feed? When you get online, are you there for a reason, or are you simply killing time? For all the pleasures and entertainments of the virtual-electronic world, there is no substitute for real-life conversation and connection, for getting ideas and entertainment from the people and places around you. Even at home, there are sublime rewards to be had for unplugging from online distractions and embracing the world before your eyes.

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Investing Advice!!

Rules That Warren Buffett Lives By

by Stephanie Loiacono
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

provided by

Warren Buffett is arguably the world’s greatest stock investor. He’s also a bit of a philosopher. He pares down his investment ideas into simple, memorable sound bites. Do you know what his homespun sayings really mean? Does his philosophy hold up in today’s difficult environment? Find out below.

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This past is littered with the detritus of contradictions, some of them very sad because they expose a dangerous fault in our character. Our loyalties circumscribed by ethnicity, family and ego obstruct the making of a nation. And this is what we still are this very day — Caviteños, Warays, Ilokanos — we are yet to be a nation. Our institutions of nationhood in themselves are hollow as evidenced in the corruption in the highest precincts of power, in our continuing poverty, not only the physical kind but the most damning of all — which is the poverty of the spirit.

In that tumultuous event in Tejeros, General Artemio Ricarte turned his back on his former leader. If Bonifacio was betrayed at Tejeros, Aguinaldo himself was, in turn, betrayed later on in Palanan when the Macabebe collaborators tricked him into his capture by the Americans.

This is all water under the bridge; now we must realize how our leaders today have betrayed us, too; they used the slogans of nationalism, the enduring ties of kinship, of patronage to assume power and colonize us.

Aside from these painful contradictions, our past also informs us how empty our country is of the hoary civilizations of Asia, the great temples, the classical arts and particularly literature, which our part of the world has in abundance.

Must we then, particularly those of us who write, feel inferior to our neighbors with their ancient cultural achievements, their great pre-colonial art?

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Got this link from Chuck. I agree that my BS detector is calling this a gimmick but, In my view anything that helps promote art, especially to people who otherwise wouldn’t know or go to that event is great for me.

Does size matter? For Shaquille O’Neal his very existence offers a larger-than-life answer to that question. Standing at 7’1”, weighing 320 pounds and strutting about in size 22 shoes, Shaq casts a long shadow. His appetites and ambitions are similarly colossal: a professional basketball star, he has also worked as an actor, rapper, memoirist and reserve police officer, and is now working on a PhD in organisational behaviour. Now, thanks to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Shaq can cross another item off his to-do list: curate an art show. “Size DOES Matter” features 66 works chosen by the man himself, and a catalogue with an essay by James Frey (yes, that James Frey).

An outsized gimmick? Perhaps. The line to attend the show’s opening on February 19th snaked outside for nearly a block. And Shaq’s selections, which feature a range of contemporary works of varying, eye-teasing sizes, were plucked from more than 200 images supplied by FLAG’s founder, Glenn Fuhrman, and director, Stephanie Roach, over dinner after a game. Still, this playful show holds up as a satisfying examination of size and scale in art.

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I’ve been giving MJ the benefit of a doubt because he was always more of the controlling type, and not having complete control is something that colored my judgment of his past decisions. I hope he shines in being an NBA owner.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — He has been called the NBA’s greatest player and one of the country’s top pitchmen.

With minutes to go until his exclusive negotiating window was to expire, Jordan struck a deal late Friday night to buy controlling interest of the Charlotte Bobcats, putting the six-time NBA champion in charge of the money-losing team in his home state.

Owner Bob Johnson announced in a statement that he’s agreed to sell the Bobcats to Jordan, who been a part-owner of since 2006. Jordan has been running the team’s basketball operations.

Filipino designer Mich Dulce is shown with one of her hats, which uses local Philippine materials, making her win the British Council’s Young Fashion Entrepreneur Award.

LONDON – From a tropical country where few people wear hats, a Filipino fashion designer and milliner, actress and musician has won the British Council’s Young Fashion Entrepreneur (YFE) Award for 2010.

Mich Dulce bested 10 competitors from Bangladesh, India, Libya, Lithuania, Russia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Turkey to become the first Filipino to be honored with the prize.